Journal of English Language Teaching

Self-selected reading for pleasure through “Talk to Books” app to improve reading skills among tertiary level learners

Ch. Suvarna Ragini

Assistant Professor, Chaitanta Bharathi Institute of Technology, Gandipet, Hyderabad, Telangana

Keywords: Reading skills, Reading for pleasure, Use of App “Talk to Books”.

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Abstract

As English Language teaching faculty, it is our common experience that a majority of the engineering students lack the required language development, to equip them with the necessary employability skills. Despite twelve years of previous exposure to English language, they remain deprived users of advanced language abilities.  Many learners remain poor readers due to non-availability of appropriate resources or ignorance of the significance of reading in their personal and professional life. Of the four language skills (LSRW), reading occupies the most helpful for the acquisition of language and literacy. In this regard, it becomes the prime responsibility of language teachers to inculcate a flair for reading among the students during their formative years. Self-selected reading for pleasure is a tremendous help in language development. This research paper is an attempt at motivating thirty first-year engineering students to develop their reading skills through an app called “Talk to Books” introduced by Google which allows the reader to communicate with a book. It is believed that given an opportunity to select a book of their choice, i.e., self-selected, reading could have an impact in improving reading skills. It involves asking questions and getting responses which can help a reader determine if one is interested in reading that book or not. It further serves as an alternative to the conventional SQ3R strategy of reading. The pre-test and post-test results showed that when the learners used the app it motivated the students in their reading to a considerable extent.

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webspage: https://books.google.com/talktobooks/